Your springtime

Everyone at some point feels the need for renewal – whether we're faced with boredom over the same old reactions to the same old problems, wearied by recurring situations that remain unsolved, or challenged by predictable flash points in some relationships.

Worn-out views are sometimes like worn-out shoes. Familiarity makes us reluctant to let them go. They feel part of our lives. But if you're plagued by the same old problems, and you react as you did yesterday and the day before, isn't it time for a new view?

Prayer helps open the way for renewal and healing. This prayer may include persistently acknowledging God's presence and power, which brings to light your divinely established relationship with God, as His spiritual idea.

Even if you don't feel very spiritually minded as you're reading this right now, you can become more aware of the divine view that God holds of each of us. Knowing that He sees us as perfect, eternal, and good enables us to face and solve our problems, whether they include ill health, unhappy or tense relationships, immorality, lack, or some other difficulty.

Rooting out dull, repetitious thinking, and identifying ourselves with spiritual qualities – such as joy, intelligence, usefulness – helps us stop mulling over depressing situations. It opens the way for new ideas, which actually are ever at hand. They constitute our essential nature as God's creation. As our relation to God, who is the origin of our being, dawns in our thought, its light dispels outmoded, depressing concepts. Seeing ourselves in this correct light is a vital step toward healing and fresh beginnings.

Mary Baker Eddy, who discovered Christian Science, described man, including male and female, as: "idea, the image of Love; he is not physique. He is the compound idea of God, including all right ideas...." ("Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," p. 475).

Recognizing the reflected presence of right ideas, or new views, results in spiritual insights. By daily looking for and appreciating new facets of our being as revealed through seeing ourselves spiritually, negative, long-held views begin to fade. And along with their disappearance go the attendant problems.

It's useful to realize that we are inseparable from God, and reflect the intelligence needed to address whatever knotty situations we face. Such problems might suggest that we are stuck with them and that they can separate us from God, but that is never true.

Coming to know ourselves as God knows us reveals our spiritual nature. This discovery of our true worth in the light of God's love is a continuing and healing adventure, one in which Jesus was constantly engaged (see John 10:37, 38).

As we daily rejoice in this new view, we can join the prophet Jeremiah in his statement of assurance, "The Lord hath appeared of old unto me, saying, Yea, I have loved these with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee" (Jer. 31:3).

Tiring of our problems can move us to become aware of the man or woman we truly are. This awareness enables us to challenge and conquer undesirable cycles of behavior – to see them instead as opportunities to express more fully the redemptive qualities of our loving Father-Mother. Then each day can bring a fresh opportunity to discover more of who we are as the sons and daughters of God. And these new views in turn will dispel whatever would tempt us to believe otherwise.

Behold,
I will do a new thing;
now it shall spring forth …
I will even make a way
in the wilderness,
and rivers in the desert. Isaiah 43:19